Rod, I appreciate this one very much. I’ve never been religious. Never, as in I was raised without religion and never have submitted to one. I have been curious and longing, alternatively thinking of myself as a “seeker” or some sort of enlightened secularist.

I almost committed to being a Buddhist, but even that (pretty minimal) level of commitment scared me off. I simultaneously am repulsed by the immorality posing as amorality that defines our consumerist culture (ecological destruction, greed, self-centeredness, self-gratification/hedonism). But I’ve also always been pretty fond of this whole idea of personal freedom and autonomy.

Well, of course, this puts “me” in the middle of all my choices, and that is exactly the problem. I’ll submit to a code of ethics, rules, and mores if I think that it makes sense to me.

Well, ok, this has worked well enough, despite not holding a religion I behave pretty morally overall, and have a high degree of satisfaction and success in my marriage, family life and profession. So no problem, right?

Wrong, and for the reasons you discuss and your friend has shared. Being a dad changes everything, including my perspective on things outside my own family. I may be confident in my own ability to make moral choices (most of the time, and I fear that I am pretty overconfident here, really), but to teach that to my kids in a culture that is sick- as in “not-well”? Then that extends to others who are not my children but who are in need of moral learning. I am a professional counselor. I work with folks who have no clue how to live well. They, like me, do not feel the need to “submit” to anything they do not agree with or desire.

Well, hell, where does this leave us? Nowhere good. The problem is not so much that we don’t know what the “good life” is, it’s that it is almost seen as taboo or moralizing to even talk about it.

See, this is why I find the lack of urgency in the face of the Catholic crisis so inexplicable, certainly coming from the editor of First Things. I write not as a Catholic, of course, nor as an aggrieved ex-Catholic, but as a small-o orthodox Christian who sees the future of the faith in the West depending heavily on what happens with the West’s mother church. That blasé attitude on the part of the Roman Catholic leadership in the face of chronic clerical corruption helped lead to the Reformation. Whether the Reformation was a good thing or a bad thing is beside the point. It was a tectonic event that shattered Western Christianity, and paved the way for the crisis of authority we’re now experiencing.

Which is the point I wish to make here. There is a profound and pervasive crisis of authority in our culture. I write about aspects of this all the time on this blog, so I will spare you the same sermon here. Note well the second quote above: we have no idea how to define the good, except in terms of expanding individual liberty and the possibility of fulfilling desire, which implies that to make firm moral judgments is a risky, even immoral, proposition. In other words, what is the good except what people choose? That may be the best we can do in our pluralistic secular society, but it produces what Michael Walzer would call a “thin” moral culture, and degree of moral discourse.

It all comes back to a crisis of authority. Again, it’s not just a Catholic matter, but the blindness of the leaders of the Catholic institution to how corruption in clerical ranks, especially among the bishops, causes their own moral authority — already under serious siege by the culture — to evaporate. It’s as if they think that the Church is like a public utility, that it will always be there, no matter what. Or, to look at it from another angle, it’s as if they don’t think the church exists for any reason other than perpetuating itself — which, if that’s true, still makes their behavior bizarre, because nothing is doing more to kill a love for an loyalty to the Church today than the behavior and judgment of its leadership.

The thing these bishops and their defenders seem to miss is that unlike in ages past, the culture was sufficiently Christian that the Church was better able to withstand corrupt clerics. They could only do so much damage to the Church as an institution, and to the authority of institutional Christianity. Those days are gone. Young Americans today aren’t becoming atheists, but they are definitely walking away from the Church (which is to say, all the churches). Notice this:

Perhaps most striking is that one-third of Americans under 30 have no religious affiliation. When comparing this with previous generations under 30, there’s a new wrinkle, says Greg Smith, a senior research at Pew.

Source: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press

Credit: Matt Stiles/NPR

“Young people today are not only more religiously unaffiliated than their elders; they are also more religiously unaffiliated than previous generations of young people ever have been as far back as we can tell,” Smith tells NPR Morning Edition co-host David Greene. “This really is something new.”

This is really something new. You’ve heard it a thousand times: “I don’t need to go to church to experience God.” From a strictly theological standpoint, that’s true, or at least conditionally true. God doesn’t live only in the temple. Yet for Catholic and Orthodox Christians, at least, there can be no authentic and sustainable Christian life outside of the sacramental community. Though most Protestants don’t have sacraments, or at least don’t have the same sacramental theology as Catholics and Orthodox, there is still a compelling need to come together as a community to receive authoritative teaching from a leader.

Unless you no longer really believe in any authority other than your own conscience. Which is why so many young Americans are walking away from religion.

It is true that the sex scandals in the Catholic Church don’t make the teachings of the church false, any more than the failures of leadership within any church or religion do the same. But they do make it much less likely that people, both inside and outside the church, are going to take those teachings seriously as a guide to truth. It seems to me so incredibly obtuse to be so sure that the Catholic Church or any church in Western culture today will endure, because of theological convictions about the nature of authority not depending on the character of those who embody and exercise it. Of course the Blessed Sacrament is still the Blessed Sacrament, even when confected by the hands of a molester priest! But who wants to be part of a church whose clergy are perceived not to be taking their own religion seriously — especially when there is no social price to be paid for leaving religion behind, and when most people in your peer group believe you don’t have to be part of a church to know God and to be a good person?

In 2002, I was in the Netherlands with my wife and son, and went to Catholic mass in a suburban Amsterdam parish. There were few people there, and nearly everybody who was there had grey hair. There was one family, though, with young teenage boys. We introduced ourselves, and ended up having dinner with them. Great people. Turns out the father was one of 11 children from a devout Catholic family. Today, he was the only one of his siblings who still practiced the faith.

And all this was before the scandal in the US, and subsequent revelations in Europe.

You think it can’t happen here? I’m thinking right now of my friend J., and what she has told me about her extended family’s religious situation. She is middle-aged. Her father and his siblings went to church, and took their kids to church, only on Easter and Christmas. Of her generation, she is the only one of the cousins who goes to church regularly, and who takes her kids to church. She says her siblings’ kids, and her cousins’ kids, some of whom are adults with kids of their own, never go to church. They’re all nice people, but they just don’t see the point.

J. tells me that she is the last link left in her family to the Church as an institution. Within two, three generations, a family that was once faithful to the Church has been lost to it. It wasn’t through trauma or persecution, but through indifference. The Church is not only not trusted by these younger generations, but they don’t even see it as having anything to do with their moral and spiritual lives.

This is a crisis. This is not a normal crisis. This is a world-historical moment for the Catholic Church in particular, and more broadly, for Christianity in the West. The once-unthinkable is not only thinkable, it’s happening. All the people in J.’s family, and in that Catholic Dutchman’s family, they’re individual souls, made by God, and desired by Him. That’s what I believe as a Christian. Though the passing of Christianity cannot possibly be good for the religious freedom of Christians in the long run, it is not an unambiguously bad thing that the Christian church is losing power and influence. Is the Christian church losing the souls of its children? Yes, and that is a catastrophe. If the Church’s leadership was fighting bravely for those souls, but losing, it would be a tragedy. The fact that the Church’s leadership seems rather too often to be fighting only for its own status and privileges, and to hell with the rest of us (including good priests doing their best), makes it something far worse than a tragedy.

There is no guarantee that my children will not be lost to the faith, though I’m doing my best to make that less likely. If they are, though, then it is more likely that their children, and their children’s children, will be as well. All it takes is a generation or two for the tradition to die. If we — bishops, pastors, and religious leaders foremost, but also all of us who claim the faith — are poor stewards of it, and squander what we have been given to care for, then judgment will fall not so much on us, but on those as yet unborn, who will not hear, or because of the post-Christian ethos, be disposed to hear, the Good News. And for this, God will hold us responsible.

Yeah, it’s a crisis. May not look that way to some, high above the fray, but that’s not what I see from down here.

UPDATE: This from TMatt:

A crisis rooted in clerical hypocrisy or outright rejection of church doctrines is especially crucial since, as noted in the Pew report you cited, the glue that holds the “unaffiliated”/”nones” together is a rejection of traditional religious teachings on sexual ethics. More than anything else, that is what the unaffiliated share.

Let me also note that the church establishment’s total lack of interest in the content of mass media and popular culture, other than whining about it from time to time, doesn’t help.

What we have here is the separation of church and life.

But the sacraments are valid no matter how hypocritical the clergy are! And didn’t Jesus say the gates of Hell would never prevail against the Church? Besides, theology teaches us that corrupt priests do not obviate the teachings of the Church. Relax. Nothing to worry about. <sarcasm>

I know a couple of Orthodox people who have stopped going to Church because the conduct of the bishops caused them to doubt that what the Church teaches is true. They’re mistaken to react that way. But I understand it. The clericalist mentality says: blame the people first.

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I should have been more clear. I was asking why so few of those who have left the Catholic church over these scandals have preferred to join the ranks of the “nones” rather than become Orthodox or Protestant?

Well, that’s one reason I entertain considerable doubt that this pack of jokers was chosen by God to be the Elect, or to rule, or to be the foundation of God’s Holy Church. Jesus made use of whomever he could get to abandon remunerative employment and live off the alms of the multitude, but that didn’t make them and whomever they laid their hands on as their successors into God’s Chosen.

What about “flesh and blood has not told you this Simon the Hooligan, and I say thou art a rock?” Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if the phrase “on this rock I will build my church” was inserted decades later, about as phony as the Donation of Constantine. The word “church” means nothing to Jesus. There’s no evidence he spoke Greek, but if he did, “ecclesia” was an assembly, not an organized denomination. Greeks and Romans and Egyptians had temples, but no churches, Jews had a Temple and synagogues, but no churches. What kind of nonsense is this, trying to put words in Jesus’s mouth that even Peter wouldn’t have understood?

My family in the UK has been completely lost to Christianity in three generations. My parents were very active churchgoers: churchwardens, teaching Sunday school, and governor of the local church school. My brother and I were active evangelical Christians through university and afterward, in my case including a six-year stint as an overseas missionary and a master’s degree in theology, before reality started to set in in our 30s and we started asking ourselves if all this could possibly be true. Now we’re both best described as post-Christian agnostics, struggling to find a way of living ethically now that the foundations for the moral framework in which we were formed have been removed.

But my brother’s children, now in their mid-to-late teens, who went to Sunday school and an Anglican-run primary school when they were younger, not only reject Christian belief but are actively hostile toward it. They view Christianity as brainwashing, attempting to force people into believing myths and lies, and the Anglican church as actively *immoral* in terms of perpetuating sexism and prejudice against gays and lesbians.

I don’t think that’s a very unusual perspective among teenagers in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. Not just “Why bother?” but an active “No, I reject that way of thinking,” based on a sense of morality framed in terms of equality, honesty, and respect. It’s painful for me to hear them – I still love and value the church, even though I can no longer say the creeds – but I can understand why they feel that way. Even without the abuse scandals, the anti-gay marriage campaigns, and the recent rejection of women bishops by the Anglican church, they would probably not have accepted Christian faith themselves. But I doubt they would have developed such active hostility.

Umechan said: “I don’t think that’s a very unusual perspective among teenagers in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. Not just “Why bother?” but an active “No, I reject that way of thinking,” based on a sense of morality framed in terms of equality, honesty, and respect. …Even without the abuse scandals, the anti-gay marriage campaigns, and the recent rejection of women bishops by the Anglican church, they would probably not have accepted Christian faith themselves. But I doubt they would have developed such active hostility.”

But then you talk to these young people and you ask them if have developed such a hostility to porn and porn users – which anyone sane person can see denigrates and dehumanizes people and sex – and they are just “fine” with it. In fact, they are quite happy to disrespect people whenever they feel like it, by using porn, or employing the attitudes promoted in porn – equality and respect certainly don’t matter to them. The same applies to promiscuity/hook-ups, spreading STDs with impunity, and normalizing homosexuality. There is no honesty is normalizing and denying how psychologically dysfunctional people with a homosexuality problem are, but liberal “honesty” doesn’t include the truth. It’s the narrative that counts.

A building doesn’t fall down because the architect was a bad person. A wicked doctor can still perform accurate surgery.

If moral and spiritual love of God and service to one another were merely incidental to the function of the Priesthood, and the Blessed Sacraments of God were merely some mechanical function with no relationship to that loving service, then sure, your analogy makes sense. But I don’t think that’s the case, and most people would tend to agree.

An architect who is bad at architecture will make buildings that will fall down, and a surgeon who is bad at medicine is not someone you want operating on you. I’m suggesting that we have priests who are demonstrably terrible at the very loving service to God that is central to their profession, and yet we are asked to believe that this doesn’t matter, that the product of their labors is not just of the highest quality, but Divine and inviolable. If you believe that, I have a bridge to nowhere you might be interested in.

Interpretations vary obviously, but for some, the phrase “on this rock I will build my church” refers not to Peter, the man, but to the confession he made. Meaning, that the community (ecclesia) of his disciples is built upon just this confession, that Jesus is Christ, and that whoever can make this same confession, is also a solid foundation of faith for Jesus to spread his gospel with. Peter just happened to be the first to make that confession. The mythology that this created some unbroken line of apostolic succession with mystical powers that no one else has, is pure politics.

It is true that the sex scandals in the Catholic Church don’t make the teachings of the church false, any more than the failures of leadership within any church or religion do the same. But they do make it much less likely that people, both inside and outside the church, are going to take those teachings seriously as a guide to truth
…………………………

I don’t see why that should happen. If a person cannot understand the validity of a teaching independently of the authority figure that pronounces it, they aren’t thinking or understanding anything for themselves. That’s really herd thinking, exactly mirroring the people who have blind faith in the APA, for example. It could be said that churches function in general based on a lot of herd thinking, but that’s a whole other can of worms.

So if the CC had said that 2+2=4 and then the abuse scandal happened, would we have to disbelieve that it equals 4?

To a large extent, the actions in the scandal violate the church’s teachings, so why should many of these teachings be discredited?

For example, the Church teaches that children should not be abused. So are people now going to disregard this teaching because of the scandal? The teaching itself is good and it is independent of how corrupt and vile the Catholic Church or any other Church or institution can be.

On the other hand, a requirement for celibacy is terrible and so is having any person with a homosexual or bisexual problem in its ranks.

You seem more than a little mis- or under-informed. If you’re really interested in the context and precedents of the Christian ecclesiastic vision, please read Louis Bouyer’s magisterial “The Church of God,” a detailed study which begins with the Jewish concept of the qehelah and the history of the Israelite spiritual community and works its way down to present times.

I am going to come back to the technology issue. About three years ago, I stopped using seurity software.

1. It didn’t sem to matter as to effect and

2. It became quite clear that the same group of security experts were also the top hackers, open source advocates and copywrite infringers.

Some kid gets caught hacking and is subsequently hired as a security software consultant. Some the hackers are running the security systems. And internet connoisuers know this. Attend and technology conference and along side Apple, IBM, Dell there “Hackers R Us”(fictional name). At those same conferences are hacking forums.

As to what constitutes right and wrong, some sense of propriety. . . seems to have become a “whatever” question. So I take the risk and scrub my hard drive a couple of times a week. I hate sharing a modem, but until, I am out of here — it’s cost effective. But what amounts to trust . . . fo’ get aboud id.

I remember the firt time I received pornography online. I was chatting, when chatting was quite unique, almost like the first moon landing. It was not anything deep, just the conversation, in the days of innocence as I like to call them. Where do you live? Ohh describe it. What do you do? Ohh cool nd you? ‘Just freindly like,’ They sent me a photo and at fairst, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. And to this day, I am not sure. I think about what that photo was. Was it a kid? An adult who looked young? Some adults do look young. But I expressed my concerns and the person simply said that was them … and yada yada. It gives on that uneasy feeling, that what’s going on isn’t really what’s going on.

But that is the nature of the internet. You think you’re on the American Conservative website, but a load of stuff has tagged onto your ISP and is dragged onto your hard drive. Any search may pull up information completely unrelated. There’s no adult saying stop this or that online. And while book purchases are expensive, I prefer them as research tools.

Does one trust their service provider? that is the nexus. That’s where the internet relationship begins, that or one’s wireless router. So you discipline your child about this. You purchase child safety software. And your child at school, “Ohh my mom and dad, blocked my access via ____. So I can’t do that anymore.” His or her friends laugh, “Ohh that is so easy to get around, here.”

The idea of authority leadership, is circumvented everyday by teachers and school administrators who longer see themselves as extensions of the communities they serve.

Everyone is afraid of calling that or this what it is for fear of offending their someone. So they don’t call it as they see it. Nevermind a generation that has grown up that offense on a personal level is racist. Huh? Even here people toss that word around and have none of the foundational aspects what it means. Why it had any power in the first place.

But for me, I may like you. I may even love you. But abortion is murder – period. Hacking is ‘breaking and entering’, same sex behavior is abnormal, evolution is a theory (sounds good, but is shy on a whole lot of science), punch someone be prepared to punch back, shoot someone they had better have been a threat and not because you started a fight you couldn’t finish, sadly the police lie and do so in court, want to invade a country better have evidence they are an actual threat and I don’t mean ten years from now, women want to be president do your time as equals on the battlefield, etc.

And perhaps, the worst miss of all is that we have not taught youth the value of what it means to be a citizen of these United States. They don’t get it. They seem unable to discriminate between Bill a citizen in Harlem from Roberto, an illegal immigrant from some other place. They blandly think, everyone’s the same. They have no critical think will power to make distinctions. Crucial distinctions. That one clergy having done something is not representative of the whole.

When I was in the second grade, and routinely spelled words backwards. There were no psychologists brought in. I just failed that grade. Harsh accountability, but in time, hardwork, my brain found a way to spell, harder, but the message of accountability was clear. It’s like the person who hit me with their car and never stepped forward, accountability. It’s the illegal immigrant, working a lawn company we hired, who upon cutting himself, wanted us to use our homeowners insurance to provide medical care — needless to say, the issues I have with that community today — stem from that moment and others, where they wanted me to take shortcuts on there behalf – accountability.

The Iraq invasion, the fiscal crisis, the housing mess, I am but a few pages in on “Bull by the Horns” but it’s the sme old story . . . twenty pages in, the most essential architects of our economy taking short cuts, and our politicians the world over hire them when they get elected. And here we come full circle, the hackers hired by the architects, the law makers hiring those who bent the law to their favor and were rewarded the same . . .

and you want me to call the occupant in the WH the President? I am supposed to fall all over myself about a Rubio, a Huntsman and the rest of that ilk?

@Heather – do you really not see the difference between the Church claiming that 2+2=4 and the testimony that Jesus rose from the dead? I don’t need the church to tell me that 2+2=4. I can prove that to myself. But I wasn’t there on that Sunday morning. I have to trust the testimony of the people who saw the resurrected Jesus. But that isn’t quite right either. I haven’t spoken with Peter or Mary – I have to trust the written accounts authenticated by the church and passed down over 2 millennia. Really smart philosophers may be able to show that classical theism isn’t irrational, but that doesn’t take us very far. Ultimately, we Christians base our faith on an event we can only know by testimony – the reliability of which depends in part on the character of those who testify.

Imagine instead that news came out that the High-z supernova team had falsified their data. That doesn’t mean that Big Bang cosmology is false, but it would cause a lot of concern. Now imagine instead that it came out that there was widespread academic dishonesty within the astrophysical community – not everyone, and perhaps not as wide spread as the plagiarism one finds among undergraduates. But heads of labs, department chairs, college deans, and program officers at NASA and NSF have been covering up instances of academic dishonest among astrophysicists. Moving them around to different schools when they got caught faking data, threatening junior faculty with denial of tenure for speaking up, and kicking grad students and postdocs out of programs for asking too many questions. All of this doesn’t mean that every thing every astrophysicist ever did was bunk. Nor does it mean that the data collected by a dishonest astrophysicist is automatically useless (2+2 still equals 4 after all). But it would be reasonable for non-astrophysicists to distrust the claims made by this community. These claims are not independently verifiable to laymen, and while some lab directors and program officers may be honest brokers and most astrophysicists honest scientists in this hypothetical, their credibility is still undermined. The cover up of misdeeds would make it impossible for the layman to know who to trust. And if it did happen in the astrophysical community, it isn’t clear that the non-scientist would be crazy to assume that the same kind of thing could be happening in the world of chemistry or biology – indeed the credibility of the entire scientific enterprise would be compromised.

I would argue that the same thing has happened to Christianity. The widespread cover-up of sexual misconduct by Bishops and Cardinals (and perhaps even the previous pope) creates a crisis of credibility. The question running through a lot of people’s heads is that if I can’t trust these guys to tell me the truth about perverted priests, how can I trust them to tell me the truth about some miracle that occurred on the other side of the globe? And if these guys are just men who will lie to me to cover embarrassment, what makes them different from the first century apostles upon whose testimony I rely for my Christian faith. How do I know that James, Thomas, Peter, and Paul weren’t covering things up like their successors?

This is the line of thought that is causing a crisis of Christianity – moral uprightness on the part of Christian leaders is crucial to the credibility of the church. It isn’t that a dishonest priest can’t effectively baptize someone or that a single unrepentant, morally compromised priest undermines the witness of the church. It is the widespread dishonesty of the leadership that is undermining the authority of the church- hence Paul’s clear instructions on the qualifications of elders and deacons to Timothy and Titus. It isn’t that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead because JPII wouldn’t act on Marcial Maciel. But it makes it much harder for people to believe and that is a very serious crisis for all of us who care about our Christian witness (protestant, catholic, and orthodox).

Part of this is because the technology industry has made it less likely that you’ll encounter malware. In the days before home firewalls hackers could directly attack home PC’s, but now most machines accesses the internet via NAT through a home firewall. Your email service now scans for incoming spam, viruses, and Trojan horses which blocks that avenue. Modern browsers (e.g Google Chrome) maintain a blacklist of sites that are known malware vectors and warn you before you visit them.

2. It became quite clear that the same group of security experts were also the top hackers, open source advocates and copywrite infringers.

There’s nothing criminal or immoral with open source development. It’s usually a different business model where the software is given away, and money is made by charging for tech support or consulting fees. It actually saves money on source code escrow which was common before open source development and is still used for close source software.

Most died in the wool penguin heads wouldn’t be caught dead using closed source software. Even closed source drivers and now hardware! So they don’t pirate software. There are IP pirates, but they’re generally not the penguin heads.

The word hacker has a double meaning due to misuse of the term by the news media. Many people who are called hackers by the technology industry do nothing criminal. They may examine computers for vulnerabilities and demonstrate them, but in a completely legal way. If they give the software vendor a heads up before exposing the flaw then we’re all better off for it. The news media tends to refer to computer criminals as hackers, but this is abuse of them term.

Sometimes ex-criminals are employed by the computer security industry because sometimes it takes a thief to catch a thief. This practice isn’t unique to computer security. Watch Nova’s “Making a Dishonest Buck” where the same practice is used against counterfeiters.

There’s also a gray area where someone develops an exploit and publishes it before giving the vendor a heads up. This is generally considered bad form because it gives computer criminals a day zero exploit to use until the patch comes out.

“A building doesn’t fall down because the architect was a bad person. A wicked doctor can still perform accurate surgery.”

If I know the architect is a ‘bad person’, wouldn’t I be prudent to worry about him specifying sub-standard materials? Cutting corners? Cheating on fees? Couldn’t one or more of those lead to a building with some severe problems even if it doesn’t collapse?

Well, that’s one reason I entertain considerable doubt that this pack of jokers was chosen by God to be the Elect, or to rule, or to be the foundation of God’s Holy Church.

And yet most of them (and their successors) were willing to be martyrs for the faith and the Church that embodies the faith. The very same Church that has survived and will continue to survive the critics for thousands of years. There must be more to the institution than the imperfect men who lead it, which is why you can trust its teachings even if you don’t trust its leaders.

Why would I not doubt the authority and ability of a priest to administer a valid Sacrament if his moral and spiritual authority have been credibly called into question?

Really? So if John Roberts was a pedophile, then Obama’s not really the President? If Obama himself was a pedophile then he’s not really the President? The validity of the oath is obliterated by the moral failings of the one making it?

If, unknown to you, your spouse was an axe murder before you got married, then the wedding vow is invalid?

Think it through. There’s more to metaphysics than the modern cult of personality.

<i If Obama himself was a pedophile then he’s not really the President? The validity of the oath is obliterated by the moral failings of the one making it?

Isn’t this basically the entire crux of the whole “birther” argument though? Obama is an illegitimate President because he is lying about where he was born? I don’t believe those accusations, and I’m guessing you probably don’t either, but if it could be proved that Obama is in fact lying about where he was born, then yes, his moral failing – “lying” would invalidate his oath of office, and his election according to the Constitution.

Rod’s stories about his friend’s families who left the church sounds familiar to me. Similar situations have happened in family. People have left the Church and/or Christianity not because of hostility, but indifference. However, I think Rod is conflating two crises here.

The sexual abuse crisis is terrible, and as a Catholic, I agree that the Church has much more to do. However, the sexual abuse crisis, and the rise in pornography use that Rod mentions as well, did not cause the crisis in Church attendance and membership. This was happening long before those problems came to light. At first, as indifference grew, people still remained nominally attached their faith, but now as more and more people leave, it becomes easier and more acceptable to identify oneself as a “none” as well. And I agree that this is a terrible failure of Christianity and the Church, that it has allowed so many people to leave the Church without giving them good reasons to stay. But the fact is, this crisis has already happened. It’s too late to change what happened in the last fifty years. When Pope Benedict said that he expected the Church to become smaller and more pure (paraphrased, I can’t find the exact quote), I don’t think he was wishing for this. He was merely predicting what would happen, and it seems his prediction is coming true.

That last point, I think, might help to explain R. R. Reno’s take on the Cardinal O’Brien scandal. He might not see the Church as in the middle of the crisis, but rather, recovering from one. Most of these abuse scandals are cases from 15-30 years ago. It seems that that period was the true crisis in the Church, but a crisis that was unseen until now.

To put it another way, after awhile the argument that “well, bad priests and Cardinals and Popes don’t invalidate the ultimate truth of Catholicism” seems uncomfortably close to the sort of thing said by un-regenerate leftists: “Just because Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao were monsters, well, that doesn’t mean Marxism is wrong.”

Wrong. If Obama had not been born in the United States, he would not be eligible to be President, per the Constitution. Where he was born is the only issue, not whether he has lied about it. Your analogy is flawed.

If a man was born in Nairobi (or London, or Paris), he cannot be President, even if he is completely truthful about it.

Willingness to die for a belief is one of the worst indicators of the truthfulness of that belief.

On the other hand, the importance of that beleif in creating a moral lifestyle is an indicator of truthfulness. And here, the widespread institutional corruption is an indicator that the belief is simply not worth incorporating into your own value system.

So if John Roberts was a pedophile, then Obama’s not really the President? If Obama himself was a pedophile then he’s not really the President? The validity of the oath is obliterated by the moral failings of the one making it?

Obama became President because he won the election, not because of anything John Roberts did. Administering the oath of office is a formality, it’s not what makes Obama President. He was officially President at (I think) 12:00 PM on the day of his inauguration, regardless of whether the oath was administered or not, or by whom.

And I understand what you’re getting at here: priests are considered “God’s elect”, regardless of their faults. So even if they are pedophiles, their administration of the sacraments is still “true”, because all you have to be is “elected” to the position, and take an oath, and then it’s “real”. But all of that relies on us believing that God would elect pedophile child molesters to serve as his sacramental servants on earth, knowingly indifferent to that fact, for reasons we cannot begin to fathom.

Spiritually, the logic of the Church and its doctrine of apostolic succession and spiritual election just makes no sense, once we find out what kind of people it deems to be among God’s elect, and how it protects such people. The notion that God’s blessing flows through a chain of human succession drenched in the worst kind of corruption, without being at all affected or diminished by that corruption, rather boggles the mind of anyone not completely brainwashed by dogma.

I am willing to bet that if Obama had been known to be a child molester, he wouldn’t have won the election, and that if afterwards he was found to be, he’d be quickly impeached and removed from office.

There is no doubt that most Protestants “have” Baptism and the Eucharist, since they do carry out the ceremonies that go by those names. But they do not understand them and treat them as objective, effectual means of grace — that is, they do not believe that those ceremonies have the character which makes them “sacramental.” What makes them “sacramental” is (as the old Anglican catechism put it) that they “signify the grace that they effect, and effect the grace that they signify.”

For “most Protestants” these ceremonies are symbolic and didactic: they symbolize a spiritual reality and state of being which has already been brought about by other means. For “sacramental Christians,” on the other hand, the sacraments themselves are the means by which those spiritual realities come into being. That’s what makes them sacramental. An Evangelical is baptized to symbolize the fact that he has been “born again”; a Catholic is “born again”by being baptized.

How the sacraments are viewed is truly a great divide in Christendom, more fundamental perhaps than the divide between Catholic and Protestant. Those who view the sacraments as effectual means of grace include Oriental Orthodox (Copts, Ethopians, Armenians, etc), Eastern Orthodox, Catholics, and Lutherans; those who view them as symbolic of realities brought about (if at all) by other means include Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and most non-Lutheran Protestant denominations. (Anglicans, as usual, find themselves on both sides of the divide. Low-Church Anglicans are “sacraments-as-symbols” folks, and High-Church Anglicans are “objective means of grace” folks.)

Church Lady: I honestly don’t follow your argument – I have some sympathy with it emotionally, but I don’t understand it intellectually. A priest saying the words of consecration or pouring water over the head of a child IS performing a “mechanical function.” In his homilies and his pastoral counseling his personality is important; when it comes to the text of the sacraments, the more robotic, the better.

It is just the opposite of considering priests an elect; it is for the benefit of the laity, who should not be denied valid sacraments by factors beyond their control.

The one quasi-exception I can think of is the sacrament of penance, where a wicked priest could hand out light penances. My understanding is that it is invalid for a priest to hear the confession of someone who was his own partner in sin (e.g., a priest cannot validly absolve his own mistress).

“I am willing to bet that if Obama had been known to be a child molester, he wouldn’t have won the election, and that if afterwards he was found to be, he’d be quickly impeached and removed from office.”

“But all of that relies on us believing that God would elect pedophile child molesters to serve as his sacramental servants on earth, knowingly indifferent to that fact, for reasons we cannot begin to fathom.”

This is another strange statement. I agree that there are many priests – certainly all pedophiles and other gross sinners, but many perfectly normal and decent people as well – who did not truly have a vocation and should never been ordained. That doesn’t affect their sacramental functions once they were mistakenly ordained.

>Spiritually, the logic of the Church and its doctrine of apostolic succession and spiritual election just makes no sense, once we find out what kind of people it deems to be among God’s elect, and how it protects such people. The notion that God’s blessing flows through a chain of human succession drenched in the worst kind of corruption, without being at all affected or diminished by that corruption, rather boggles the mind of anyone not completely brainwashed by dogma.

I usually agree with you, but cannot here. Maybe apostolic succession makes no sense, but it’s like what Churchill said of democracy: the worst form of government until you consider all the others.

What are the alternatives? Worrying constantly about whether your clergyman is good enough to convey God’s promised blessings in the sacraments? No, thanks. Who’s ever good enough and how? What does that mean?
Daddy Moss in his theological treatise said that Anglican liturgy and teaching do not preclude receptionism. This is the view that you receive sacramental grace if you believe that you do, and you don’t if you don’t. But it is arguably not the default position, which is that of the Real Presence. If we had to rely on our own mental state to receive grace, this would be very precarious. The Eucharist takes us from one place to a better place. As one preacher described it, we may have any of different three things in mind when we say “The Body of Christ”. How does it make sense to use the same term for all three? First there is Christ’s physical body, incarnate, crucified, risen, and ascended. Third, there is the church herself. Second, there is the Blessed Sacrament. The sacrament is the channel through which Christ’s Body in heaven comes down and makes the church militant His body on earth. The various uses of the term seem pretty scatterbrained without this understanding.

Furthermore, what else than a sacramental community gives us confidence that we’re not off the rails in our own sense of closeness to God? David Koresh felt quite certain that he was hearing God. So did Jim Jones– to name just two examples as weird as any pope.

Re: If a man was born in Nairobi (or London, or Paris), he cannot be President, even if he is completely truthful about it.

Strictly speaking that is not true. If the man’s parents were both American citizens he is still considered a natural-born American citizen regardless of his place of birth, assuming that neither he not his parents subsequently renounced American citizenship. This was the situation with John McCain, and way back in 1968 with George Romney (born in Mexico).

A priest saying the words of consecration or pouring water over the head of a child IS performing a “mechanical function.” In his homilies and his pastoral counseling his personality is important; when it comes to the text of the sacraments, the more robotic, the better.

That is part of the problem. Is the sacramental blessing of God really just a “mechanical function”, that occurs simply because someone says the correct words in the right order, and performs a few actions? Is God just a machine, that we manipulate by our pushing the right buttons? If so, then all the more reason why people reject traditional religion and its precepts.

What you are describing is really just cargo cultism. You know who they were, these native Pacific Islanders where the Air Force established runways and based to fight the Japanese. The natives saw these big planes fly in from the sky, bringing miraculous cargo. Then, when the war ended, the planes went away, and the Islanders wondered how they could invoke the same magic and bring the cargo back. So they built replicas of the airplanes out of tree trunks and so forth, and then did a little dance and magical invocations, hoping that the cargo would appear. It never did.

This version of “sacramental consecration” is very much a form of cargo cultism. When Jesus was alive, he had this great Divine presence and power that people could feel and experience. His apostles seemed to be full of this Holy Spirit also, to some degree at least. But over time, it sure doesn’t seem to have been passed on. Why? Because there’s a real spiritual process involved, not just some dead mechanical zombie cargo cult imitation. What we have is priests going through the ritual, as if there were an actual engine in the airplane of their Church, when in fact that’s dead, because the priests themselves don’t know how to actually connect to Jesus spiritually anymore, in a fashion that would actually bring his blessing down so that others could feel it and experience it.

Some exceptions, of course, among the genuinely spiritual alive, but the doctrine of the Church doesn’t even seem to care about the actual process, they just want the cargo cult version, because anyone can do that, even a child molesting monster. It’s much better for business, they thought, to just have the ritual, and call it the real thing, and expect that no one will be able to tell the difference. It works to some degree, because the faith of the congregants often is strong enough to bring the blessing anyway, since it really doesn’t need a priest in the first place. God doesn’t work that way, requiring that priestly ritual to confer his blessing on anyone. You don’t have to be a Christian even. The sun does shine on sinner and innocent alike, but it requires a turning to God, not some priestly ritual, to make it come alive. The engine really does have to work, has to turn on, for the sacrament to be effective.

People believing that they’ve been blessed by God, because a priest did the mechanical actions, are sadly deluded. That doesn’t mean they haven’t been blessed, however, if they are sincere and have truly humbled themselves before God in the process. It just has nothing in particular to do with the priest or the ritual. The priest is useful if they really are alive in God, and can actually live a holy life, such that others feel the blessing of God alive in them. And so it’s a good thing that the blessing really isn’t moving through the priest, or dependent on the ritual.

If, however, the doctrine is that the blessing really does require the priest, it simply staggers the imagination that it can be the most corrupt priest in the world, and it won’t matter, because these people are chosen by God to be his intermediaries for the communication of his blessing. Most people simply don’t find such an assertion in any way credible as the way God would communicate himself to those who love him, through some corrupt child molester’s intercession.

Again – this is misunderstanding the issue – of course he would be removed from office, but his prior rulings would not be invalidated.

Of course, because he’s just a lawyer working off of legal knowledge and training, not someone conveying God’s miraculous blessing through his decisions.

If, on the other hand, we were led to believe that John Roberts was a judge in St. Peter’s Court, handing down his decisions from God himself, and we found out that he was a child molester, I think that would, indeed, invalidate all his previous decisions. We would no longer imbue them with the authority of God, we would see that they were just the work of a charlatan child-molesting fraud.

Likewise, the authority of the priesthood, and of the entire apostolic lineage that imbues Bishops, Cardinals, and the Pope with great authority and blessing power, is called into question, and many people are seeing it as fraudulent, now that we see how many child molesting monsters it has had in its midst, and used that authority to protect and permit their crimes to continue undetected for decades. Yes, that really does seem to invalidate their previous claims to sacramental power and authority.

@Chris Jones Most protestant traditions are sacramental. Baptists are the main exception. The Westminster and Heidelberg catechisms both assert something along the lines of…” There is in every sacrament a spiritual relation, or sacramental union, between the sign and the thing signified; whence it comes to pass that the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other. The grace which is exhibited in or by the sacraments, rightly used, is not conferred by any power in them; neither doth the efficacy of a sacrament depend upon the piety or intention of him that doth administer it, but upon the work of the Spirit, and the word of institution, which contains, together with a precept authorizing the use thereof, a promise of benefit to worthy receivers…” I’m not sure where methodism falls, but I would be surprised if they balked at “means of grace”. Now the laity are something else entirely, but in my experience that is true for RCs too.

What are the alternatives? Worrying constantly about whether your clergyman is good enough to convey God’s promised blessings in the sacraments? No, thanks. Who’s ever good enough and how? What does that mean?

All that is required is that we turn out attention to God with whatever faculties we have at our disposal, in real time, and remain present to Him. I’m not against liturgies or ceremony. I think these are helpful to many people. But they are merely aids to the crucial act of turning our attention to God. We don’t need to be in any way perfect in that. Even child molesters can do it, and must at some point. It’s very Kurt Cobain: come as you are.

The priest’s role is not as a necessary intercessionary, but as an inspiring figure re-enacting outwardly for us to see what must go on inwardly for us to receive the blessing. Without the inner reception, no amount of blessing will make a difference. The mystery is that we often don’t know what is going on inside us, only God does. Which is why the act of turning our attention to God in our deepest feeling must be maintained as a discipline, not based on results, but on inner faith. The clergyman is incidental, and shouldn’t be made the main thing. The Church shouldn’t focus on him, and pretend he has some magical sacramental blessing power. That power belongs to God, and is given to us directly, even if we are too closed up to notice. It is always given, not just during the ceremony, but at all times. The ceremony is a way of concentrating our attention in what is always going on, to create a lasting impression in us that can serve as a living testament throughout the day or week or year.

If we had to rely on our own mental state to receive grace, this would be very precarious.

Real Christian practice is always precarious. We are always walking that “razor’s edge”. We have to be always vigilant as to the direction of our attention. As Jesus said, sin is in the mind; even if we do not act sinfully, but think of sin, we have done it all the same. And sin means turning out attention away from God. It’s not the list of naughty things we do, it’s a question of where our attention goes day in day out, moment to moment even. That’s an increasingly powerful calling to answer, and it’s only done through a discipline of the mind that we can fulfill the calling. It’s not so important how attentive we are in the ceremony itself, but how we are in our whole life, to the Real Presence.

Action of course matters, because the mind tends to follow action. Just as during the ceremony of the Eucharist, we follow the priest with out attention, and mirror that in our own heart, in our life we must live by action that allows our attention to follow God’s Grace and Presence. Sinful actions are those which lead our mind elsewhere, even to seemingly “good” places. So the Eucharist is a sacramental training for the mind, which shows us how to maintain our attention on God at all times.

The sacrament is the channel through which Christ’s Body in heaven comes down and makes the church militant His body on earth.

Only if we understand the Eucharist as a living symbol for what we need to be doing at all times, and not merely some mechanical action that miraculously brings God into us and strengthens us vicariously. That’s simply not what occurs, and a Church which teaches the Eucharist in this manner is missing the point, in my heretical view.

I don’t think the SC analogy fails. The problem isn’t the few ad apples among the priests or the efficacy of various baptisms. The issue is credibility…the RCC has no real power. Their authority depends on credibility. The cover up of pedophiles and other sexual misconduct by cardinals and even the previous pope undermines their credibility. If a cardinal can’t be honest about his mistakes, how can I trust him about anything. And if these guys aren’t trustworthy, why should I believe their predecessors were. And if I follow theapostolic succession all the way back, how can I trust the testimony of the first apostles? This is the crisis wrought by the scandal. Above I posted a rambling response toHeather draw ing an analogy to scientific misconduct. I think this better captures the state of the crisis.

It’s the power of the office versus the character of the person in the office.

A Justice of the Peace can perform marriages on behalf of the state. If it’s later discovered that the JP was a pedophile, then all of those people aren’t married?

Why do we have expressions like “physician, heal thyself” or “those who can’t do, teach” or “the cobblers children have no shoes”? Can’t a person have legitimate authority and even wisdom and yet fail to put their gifts to use in their own lives?

If you know someone who fails to follow their own advice then you deduce that their advice must be defective?